Post-Capitalist Society

Book excerpt: Post-Capitalist Society provides an analysis of the transformation of the world into a post-capitalist society. This transformation, which will not be completed until 2010 or 2020, has already changed the political, economic, social, and moral landscape of the world. The book reviews and revises the social, economic, and political history of the Age of Capitalism and of the nation state. It argues that the real and controlling resource and the absolutely decisive 'factor of production' is neither capital, nor land, nor labor. It is knowledge. Instead of capitalists and proletarians, the classes of the post-capitalist society are knowledge workers and service workers. This book covers a wide range of topics, dealing with post-capitalist society; with post-capitalist polity; and with new challenges to knowledge itself. The focus is on the developed countries—on Europe, on the United States and Canada, on Japan and the newly developed countries on the mainland of Asia, rather than on the developing countries of the Third World. The areas of discussion—Society, Polity, and Knowledge—are arrayed in order of predictability.